I reflexively installed 11.2 as soon as I saw it was available. What could go wrong. It’s not like they also rushed that update overnight, to fix a bug that was putting thousands of phones in a reboot loop.

We can disagree on how much time the devs should have spent on comfort options (there are none) but I don’t think it’s acceptable for a third-person game in VR to let the camera jump up when the character steps on a fucking pebble.

Fuck. It just dawned on me that my four-year-old MacBook Pro has been swelling over the last few weeks. (Or much longer if my issues with the trackpad’s button were the first symptom.) It’s awesome because I’m kinda broke right now.

My daughter is 5. I don’t want her to have this, and I don’t want her friends to badger her into getting it. This is expanding the Network Effect of Facebook (& all its concomitant pitfalls) into childhood. It’s gross. [twitter.com]

One of my favorite samples from the Progressive GANs paper is this one from the “cat” category. Apparently some of the cat training photos were memes with text. The GAN doesn’t know what text is so it has made up new text-like imagery in the right place for a meme caption.

I’m trialling a new experimental laptop from Apple. The return of USB-A and SD Card slot is genius. Touch screen and pencil support is surprisingly useful. Touch bar is gone but I won’t miss it. Face ID is 👌

It’s just like that old saying; “Do what you love for a living and the increasingly unclear distinction between your personal and professional identity will make it extremely difficult to feel emotionally secure at basically any point in the process”

In summary: ten years ago bankers gambled with all our money, lost most of it, caused a global financial crisis, which resulted in austerity, that was manipulated into anti-migrant rage by billionaire tax-exile press-barons, revitalised the far right and brought Trump and Brexit.

I honestly find it pretty troubling how much of the reporting of the Disney-Fox acquisition is just squee over the Marvel possibilities rather than real concern over the insidious nature of a growing media monopoly.

It’s funny how we were all a little worried about High Sierra’s switch to APFS and it seems to be the only thing they didn’t screw up. (Talking general OS reliability, not mis-attributed UI fields in Disk Utility.)

If you weren’t enough of a risk-taker to buy bitcoin at $30, you also aren’t enough of a risk-taker to not have sold it the minute you had multiplied your holdings ten-fold, so don’t beat yourself up over hypotheticals

Here’s what I think is happening with @Patreon - this year they raised $60m in Series C venture funds at a valuation of $450 million (after raising $30m last year and more than doubling the company’s size - almost always a mistake). Yet they make about $8 million per year. 1/10

Most sane company valuations are 10x-20x revenue, with 20x being a high-end for desirable acquihires by Google/etc. Under that math, Patreon should be worth $80-$160 million. Yet they raised at $450m. 56x revenue! This means they’re under intense pressure to increase $$$. 2/10

I’ll reconsider when Monster Hunter has a photo safari mode. I don’t even understand how they can spend so much time designing and animating all those creatures and not want to offer more peaceful interactions.

It’s presumably intended as a workaround for devices going from 60% to shutdown in a few minutes after the iOS 10 update, but I’m gonna be hard-pressed for arguments the next time someone cries “planned obsolescence.”

12 décembre

Inside and Gorogoa are now available to pre-order on the App Store, in what appears to be a brand new system Apple has rolled out to allow people to pre-order upcoming iOS games and apps: [toucharcade.com] by @hodapp

Second time I change an iPhone 6’s battery and those adhesive strips are still assholes but INSTAGRAM IS SCROLLING SMOOTHLY AGAIN. (Ish. Feels like they preload images a bit late? But scrolling used to overwhelm the proc so much it would misjudge swipes and skip entire screens.)

This contemptuous view of public transit (and by extension, urban infrastructure that relies on people sharing space generally) is so gross and distrustful and condescending. I hate the idea that people like this are trying to shape the design of cities. [twitter.com]

Anti-Fascists You Should Know: Bunny Roger, couturier, sometime drag queen & RL model for John Steed. Served with exceptional courage in WWII (once dragging a wounded officer from a burning building) & remarked “Now I’ve shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat”

“[The paperclip maximizer AI] scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.” [twitter.com]

Stated as if it were a bad thing 🙄 I’m not so keen on Facebook automagically building a database on me without my consent, which is of course what they’re doing even though I don’t have a Facebook account [twitter.com]

Apparently porgs are in the new #StarWars because it was easier than digitally removing the hundreds of puffins living on Skellig Michael island where it was filmed. Which means they’re basically SPACE PUFFINS!!

As you read all the “move along, nothing to see here” tech-blog posts on Apple slowing down old iPhones, keep in mind that the company’s PR strategy involves cultivating friendly reporters and freezing out those who criticize it.

The problem with that is that the majority of people coming in w battery issues have software or usability problems, not a hardware problem. It would also cause repair times to balloon when they’d like repairs done within 30-60 mins

Great anecdote on @bbcr4 woman’s hour about a woman who cut the end off ham when she baked one. Her daughter asked why. “because that’s what my mum did”. So they rang her mum to ask why. Same response. So they rang her mum who was in a home. “We do that as the oven was too small”

I would always have picked better performance over better battery life, because a portable battery pack is an easy thing to tote — and it would have been obvious that a new battery was needed; you can’t work around an artificially strangled CPU — you have to buy a new device

The beginning of Assassin’s Creed: Origins is making me wonder if I accidentally pressed a “skip everything you can” button. There’s “in medias res” and then there’s “WTF has been happening for the last ten minutes?”

@jack et al. are likely of a common tech-male neo-Libertarian mindset (with not-subtle undertones of misogyny and racism) to let anyone say anything, disregarding the human costs, as long as their metrics go up. [twitter.com]

The publisher knew who Yiannopoulos was when they gave him a $255,000 advance. The editor’s brutal comments are somewhat entertaining, but none of this should distract from the fact that they sought to make his bigotry both digestible and marketable. [trib.al]

Finally went back to Thumper and managed to pass the asshole at 4-11 (I never want to play it again, which is a shame because I enjoyed the following sub-levels a lot). Was not prepared for the heart-attack-inducing entirety of level 5 😵